Old Pickup Truck Quotes

Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack’s big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis’s straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other’s toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and his daughters, little darlin.

There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in Western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me. It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he's capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work. Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickup truck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.

I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me. It’s the beautiful thing about youth. There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

Dominic tooled up five minutes later in a ten-year-old Nissan pickup truck that had been painted a non-standard khaki, dipped in dried mud up to the wheel arches and then randomly smacked with a sledgehammer to give it that Somali Technical look. I found myself checking to see if there was a mount for a fifty-caliber machine gun in the back.

Richards remembered the day - that glorious and terrible day - watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24-7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn't even remember why. He'd thought it right then; no, he'd felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they'd all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees - the subjects hadn't changed, they never would, all coming down, after you'd boiled away the bullshit, to somebody's quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where - but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me. It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work.

We’re walking to our cars when Gabe says, “Hey, Lara Jean, did you know that if you say your name really fast, it sounds like Large? Try it! LaraJean.” Dutifully I repeat, “LaraJean. Larjean. Largy. Actually I think it sounds more like Largy, not Large.” Gabe nods to himself and announces, “I’m going to start calling you Large. You’re so little it’s funny. Right? Like those big guys who go by the name Tiny?” I shrug. “Sure.” Gabe turns to Darrell. “She’s so little she could be our mascot.” “Hey, I’m not that small,” I protest. “How tall are you?” Darrell asks me. “Five two,” I fib. It’s more like five one and a quarter. Tossing his spoon in the trash, Gabe says, “You’re so little you could fit in my pocket!” All the guys laugh. Peter’s smiling in a bemused way. Then Gabe suddenly grabs me and throws me over his shoulder like I’m a kid and he’s my dad. “Gabe! Put me down!” I shriek, kicking my legs and pounding on his chest. He starts spinning around in a circle, and all the guys are cracking up. “I’m going to adopt you, Large! You’re going to be my pet. I’ll put you in my old hamster cage!” I’m giggling so hard I can’t catch my breath and I’m starting to feel dizzy. “Put me down!” “Put her down, man,” Peter says, but he’s laughing too. Gabe runs toward somebody’s pickup truck and sets me down in the back. “Get me out of here!” I yell. Gabe’s already running away. All the guys start getting into their cars. “Bye, Large!” they call out. Peter jogs over to me and extends his hand so I can hop down. “Your friends are crazy,” I say, jumping onto the pavement. “They like you,” he says. “Really?” “Sure. They used to hate when I would bring Gen places. They don’t mind if you hang out with us.” Peter slings his arm around me. “Come on, Large. I’ll take you home.” As we walk to his car, I let my hair fall in my face so he doesn’t see me smiling. It sure is nice being part of a group, feeling like I belong.

C’mon!” Marlboro Man shouted, jumping onto the back of a nearby spray truck driven by an elderly man. “Hop in there with Charlie!” He pointed toward the door of the old, royal blue vehicle. Not having many other appealing options, I ran to the truck and hopped inside. “Well…hi, darlin’!” the old man said, putting his truck into gear. “You ready?” “Um, sure,” I replied. Who was Charlie? Had we met before? Why was I in his spray truck, and where was he taking me? I would have asked Marlboro Man these questions, but he’d jumped onto the back of the truck too quickly. As far as I could tell, I was riding in the pickup with an elderly gentleman who was about to drive the both of us straight into hell. I guess I’d have to ask all my questions later…when they wouldn’t be so relevant anymore.

Then one day Chip showed up with the back of his pickup truck just loaded with old metal letters he’d found at a flea market--big, oddly shaped letters taken from various old signs. They were mismatched and rusty and dented--and I loved them. We tacked them up on the front of the shop, spelling out the name that would come to mean so much: Magnolia. The letters were uneven and looked a little handmade and ragged, but it seemed to work. I loved this sign because Chip designed it and made it with his own two hands. It came together in such an imperfectly perfect way, and I hoped people would get it. To this day that sign is one of my proudest accomplishments. I’m no Joanna Gaines, but I certainly see things differently and love design in my own unique way. That first sign really reflected that for me. I would glow when I would hear a customer come in the shop and say, “I saw the sign and just had to stop in.

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

Why do you go like this? Are you a thief?” “I’m going to kill him.” Shadows from the lamplight shifted on the old man’s features as he tilted his head. “What did he do?” “He kidnapped my wife.” “How do you know this?” “He threatened it. And it has been done.” The man stepped nearer the pickup, raising the lantern to see Arif better. “Truly?” “Truly.” “Is it tha’r?” A revenge killing. “Yes.” The old one kept the lantern high while he studied Arif from below. His tongue worked inside his cheeks, behind his gray beard. In the light, the man was not so old and blue-eyed. He pointed to the big house behind the wall. “You know who he is? This family, the Bayt Ba-Jalal?” “I know very well.” The old man squinted. “You have killed before?” “A long time ago.” “So you understand?” “Yes.” Slowly, the man inclined his head to Arif as if in the presence of someone exalted. “Insha’Allah.” If God wills. He turned to gesture the younger one forward. This man came leading the mule. The elder took the animal by the bridle while the younger man stepped onto the pickup truck bed. He was burly and the truck’s springs sagged under him. He bent, clasping his hands to make a step. The old man shook the lantern at Arif. “Up you go, then.

I looked around and realized we were headed down a different road than Marlboro Man would normally take. “I have to give you your wedding present,” Marlboro Man said before I could ask where we were going. “I can’t wait a month before I give it to you.” Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. “But…,” I stammered. “I haven’t gotten yours yet.” Marlboro Man clasped my hand, continuing to look forward at the road. “Yes you have,” he said, bringing my hand to his lips and turning me to a pool of melted butter right in his big Ford truck. We wound through several curves in the road, and I tried to discern whether I’d been there before. My sense of direction was lousy; everything looked the same to me. Finally, just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, we came upon an old barn. Marlboro Man pulled up beside it and parked. Confused, I looked around. He got me a barn? “What…what are we doing here?” I asked. Marlboro Man didn’t answer. Instead, he just turned off the pickup, turned to me…and smiled. “What is it?” I asked as Marlboro Man and I exited the pickup and walked toward the barn. “You’ll see,” he replied. He definitely had something up his sleeve. I was nervous. I always hated opening gifts in front of the person who gave them to me. It made me uncomfortable, as if I were sitting in a dark room with a huge spotlight shining on my head. I squirmed with discomfort. I wanted to turn and run away. Hide in his pickup. Hide in the pasture. Lie low for a few weeks. I didn’t want a wedding present. I was weird that way. “But…but…,” I said, trying to back out. “But I don’t have your wedding present yet.” As if anything would have derailed him at that point. “Don’t worry about that,” Marlboro Man replied, hugging me around the waist as we walked. He smelled so good, and I inhaled deeply. “Besides, we can share this one.” That’s strange, I thought. Any fleeting ideas I’d had that he’d be giving me a shiny bracelet or sparkly necklace or other bauble suddenly seemed far-fetched. How could he and I share the same tennis bracelet? Maybe he got me one of those two-necklace sets, the ones with the halved hearts, I thought, and he’ll wear one half and I’ll wear the other. I couldn’t exactly picture it, but Marlboro Man had never been above surprising me. Then again, we were walking toward a barn.

My cold-weather gear left a lot to be desired: black maternity leggings under boot-cut maternity jeans, and a couple of Marlboro Man’s white T-shirts under an extra-large ASU sweatshirt. I was so happy to have something warm to wear that I didn’t even care that I was wearing the letters of my Pac-10 rival. Add Marlboro Man’s old lumberjack cap and mud boots that were four sizes too big and I was on my way to being a complete beauty queen. I seriously didn’t know how Marlboro Man would be able to keep his hands off of me. If I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the feed truck, I’d shiver violently. But really, when it came right down to it, I didn’t care. No matter what I looked like, it just didn’t feel right sending Marlboro Man into the cold, lonely world day after day. Even though I was new at marriage, I still sensed that somehow--whether because of biology or societal conditioning or religious mandate or the position of the moon--it was I who was to be the cushion between Marlboro Man and the cruel, hard world. That it was I who’d needed to dust off his shoulders every day. And though he didn’t say it, I could tell that he felt better when I was bouncing along, chubby and carrying his child, in his feed truck next to him. Occasionally I’d hop out of the pickup and open gates. Other times he’d hop out and open them. Sometimes I’d drive while he threw hay off the back of the vehicles. Sometimes I’d get stuck and he’d say shit. Sometimes we’d just sit in silence, shivering as the vehicle doors opened and closed. Other times we’d engage in serious conversation or stop and make out in the snow. All the while, our gestating baby rested in the warmth of my body, blissfully unaware of all the work that awaited him on this ranch where his dad had grown up. As I accompanied Marlboro Man on those long, frigid mornings of work, I wondered if our child would ever know the fun of sledding on a golf course hill…or any hill, for that matter. I’d lived on the ranch for five months and didn’t remember ever hearing about anyone sledding…or playing golf…or participating in any recreational activities at all. I was just beginning to wrap my mind around the way daily life unfolded here: wake up early, get your work done, eat, relax, and go to bed. Repeat daily. There wasn’t a calendar of events or dinner dates with friends in town or really much room for recreation--because that just meant double the work when you got back to work. It was hard for me not to wonder when any of these people ever went out and had a good time, or built a snowman. Or slept past 5:00 A.M.

Then I heard it--the voice over the CB radio. “You’re on fire! You’re on fire!” The voice repeated, this time with more urgency, “Charlie! Get out! You’re on fire!” I sat there, frozen, unable to process the reality of what I’d just heard. “Oh, shit!” sweet little Charlie yelled, grabbing his door handle. “We’ve got to get out, darlin’--get outta here!” He opened his door, swung his feeble knees around, and let gravity pull him out of the pickup; I, in turn, did the same. Covering my head instinctively as I ditched, I darted away from the vehicle, running smack-dab into Marlboro Man’s brother, Tim, in the process. He was spraying the side of Charlie’s pickup, which, by now, was engulfed in flames. I kept running until I was sure I was out of the path of danger. “Ree! Where’d you come from?!?” Tim yelled, barely taking his eyes off the fire on the truck, which, by then, was almost extinguished. Tim hadn’t known I was on the scene. “You okay?” he yelled, glancing over to make sure I wasn’t on fire, too. A cowboy rushed to Charlie’s aid on the other side of the truck. He was fine, too, bless his heart. By now Marlboro Man had become aware of the commotion, not because he’d seen it happen through the smoke, but because his hose had reached the end of its slack and Charlie’s truck was no longer following behind. Another spray truck had already rushed over to Marlboro Man’s spot and resumed chasing the fire--the same fire that might have gobbled up a rickety, old spray truck, an equally rickety man named Charlie, and me. Luckily Tim had been nearby when a wind gust blew the flames over Charlie’s truck, and had acted quickly. The fire on the truck was out by now, and Marlboro Man rushed over, grabbed my shoulders, and looked me over--trying, in all the confusion, to make sure I was in one piece. And I was. Physically, I was perfectly fine. My nervous system, on the other hand, was a shambles. “You okay?” he shouted over the crackling sounds of the fire. All I could do was nod and bite my lip to keep from losing it. Can I go home now? was the only thing going through my mind. That, and I want my mommy. The fire was farther away by now, but it seemed to be growing in intensity. Even I could tell the wind had picked up. Marlboro Man and Tim looked at each other…and burst out in nervous laughter--the kind of laugh you laugh when you almost fall but don’t; when your car almost goes off a cliff but comes to a stop right at the edge; when your winning team almost misses the winning pass but doesn’t; or when your fiancée and a local cowboy are almost burned alive…but aren’t. I might have laughed, too, if I could muster any breath.

Miraculously, thirty minutes later I found Marlboro Man’s brother’s house. As I pulled up, I saw Marlboro Man’s familiar white pickup parked next to a very large, imposing semi. He and his brother were sitting inside the cab. Looking up and smiling, Marlboro Man motioned for me to join them. I waved, getting out of my car and obnoxiously taking my purse with me. To add insult to injury, I pressed the button on my keyless entry to lock my doors and turn on my car alarm, not realizing how out of place the dreadful chirp! chirp! must have sounded amidst all the bucolic silence. As I made my way toward the monster truck to meet my new love’s only brother, I reflected that not only had I never in my life been inside the cab of a semi, but also I wasn’t sure I’d ever been within a hundred feet of one. My armpits were suddenly clammy and moist, my body trembling nervously at the prospect of not only meeting Tim but also climbing into a vehicle nine times the size of my Toyota Camry, which, at the time, was the largest car I’d ever owned. I was nervous. What would I do in there? Marlboro Man opened the passenger door, and I grabbed the large handlebar on the side of the cab, hoisting myself up onto the spiked metal steps of the semi. “Come on in,” he said as he ushered me into the cab. Tim was in the driver’s seat. “Ree, this is my brother, Tim.” Tim was handsome. Rugged. Slightly dusty, as if he’d just finished working. I could see a slight resemblance to Marlboro Man, a familiar twinkle in his eye. Tim extended his hand, leaving the other on the steering wheel of what I would learn was a brand-spanking-new cattle truck, just hours old. “So, how do you like this vehicle?” Tim asked, smiling widely. He looked like a kid in a candy shop. “It’s nice,” I replied, looking around the cab. There were lots of gauges. Lots of controls. I wanted to crawl into the back and see what the sleeping quarters were like, and whether there was a TV. Or a Jacuzzi. “Want to take it for a spin?” Tim asked. I wanted to appear capable, strong, prepared for anything. “Sure!” I responded, shrugging my shoulders. I got ready to take the wheel. Marlboro Man chuckled, and Tim remained in his seat, saying, “Oh, maybe you’d better not. You might break a fingernail.” I looked down at my fresh manicure. It was nice of him to notice. “Plus,” he continued, “I don’t think you’d be able to shift gears.” Was he making fun of me? My armpits were drenched. Thank God I’d work black that night. After ten more minutes of slightly uncomfortable small talk, Marlboro Man saved my by announcing, “Well, I think we’ll head out, Slim.” “Okay, Slim,” Tim replied. “Nice meeting you, Ree.” He flashed his nice, familiar smile. He was definitely cute. He was definitely Marlboro Man’s brother. But he was nothing like the real thing.

Shelby was within ten miles of her Uncle Walt’s ranch when she had to pull over to the side of highway 36, the busiest stretch between Virgin River and Fortuna, behind an old pickup truck that looked vaguely familiar. Although 36 was the highway that ran across the mountains from Red Bluff to Fortuna, it was mostly two lane. She put her cherry-red Jeep SUV in Park and stepped out of the vehicle. The rain had finally stopped, giving way to a bright summer sun, but the road was wet and splattered with muddy puddles. She peered way up the road to see a man wearing a bright orange vest holding a stop sign toward a long string of cars, closing both lanes. The turnoff to her Uncle Walt’s would be on the other side of the next hill.

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road, my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first through the woods, then out into the open fields past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere. I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening a prayer for being here, today, now, alive in this life, in this evening, under this sky. "Winter: Tonight: Sunset

Aren’t we waiting for Lori?” Jonah asked. Toby didn’t turn around as he answered. “Nah, she isn’t coming. We’ll meet up with her later today.” Great. Lori was too pissed to see him and Toby was like Antarctica. Jonah still wasn’t completely sure why they were so angry, given the fact that Zev hadn’t told anyone back home about their relationship. Well, there was one option; his old friends weren’t comfortable with him being gay. Tough shit. Jonah figured the best way to deal with the situation was to face it head-on. But as soon as they got into Jonah’s car, Toby started fiddling with the radio. Jonah decided to bide his time and wait for Toby to finish what he was doing so they could talk. He almost lost his composure when the other man landed on a Barry Manilow song and kept it there. Toby had to be the only Fanilow under the age of fifty. “So I’m guessing Lori told you about that guy in my apartment last night.” Toby’s posture immediately stiffened. Several long moments passed before he answered. “Yeah, she did.” “Anything you want to ask me about it, Toby? Might as well get it out there. No reason to walk on eggshells around each other.” “Ooookay,” Toby responded, drawing out the word. He took a deep breath and turned to face Jonah. “Did you stumble across a clearance sale on jackass cream or something? Maybe they were running a special on lobotomies?” Well, that was an unexpected response. “Huh? Whatta you mean?” “What I mean, Jonah…,” Toby said in a louder voice, “is that I know we’re all just a couple of bad decisions away from being one of those weirdos who buys fake nuts and hangs them on the back of his pickup truck, but you really managed to win the stupid cake last night.” Okay, this conversation wasn’t going exactly how Jonah had planned, but he still felt the need to defend himself. “Stupid? Why? Because I’m gay? That’s not a bad decision, Toby. It’s not a decision at all.” Jonah pulled into a parking lot of a decent diner, turned off the car, and turned to face Toby. The conversation was tense and awkward, but at least Toby’s atrocious music was no longer making Jonah’s ears bleed. Jonah would have preferred hearing his car engine drop out and drag across the asphalt than another cheesy ballad. “No shit, Sherlock. But cheating on Zev is a decision. A really bad decision.” Jonah’s mouth dropped open, and he snapped his eyes toward Toby in shock. Holy crap. Toby knew about his relationship with Zev. That meant Lori knew. As much as he hated being hidden from Zev’s family and life back in Etzgadol, Jonah didn’t want the man to be forced out against his will. “You know?” “Know what?” “About, um, me and Zev?” Toby rolled his eyes. “Of course I know. Just because I was blessed in the looks department doesn’t mean I was shorted anything upstairs. I’m not an idiot, Jonah.

An old pickup truck approached from ahead, slowed, and seemed ready to stop. The driver leaned out and yelled, “Come on, Romey, not again.” The cop turned around and yelled back, “Get outta here!” The truck stopped on the center line, and the driver yelled, “You gotta stop that, man.” The cop unsnapped his holster, whipped out his black pistol, and said, “You heard me, get outta here.” The truck lurched forward, spun its rear tires, and sped away. When it was twenty yards down the road, the cop aimed his pistol at the sky and fired a loud, thundering shot that cracked through the valley and echoed off the ridges. Samantha screamed and began crying. The cop watched the truck disappear, then said, “It’s okay, it’s okay. He’s always butting in. Now, where were we?” He stuck the pistol back into the holster

Not an hour after Olivia was found, Portia and her mother were in the family's ancient pickup truck, bumping along the dirt roads of backwater Texas until they came to her grandmother's cafe, a place that had been handed down through generations of Gram's ancestors. The Glass Kitchen. Portia loved how its whitewashed clapboard walls and green tin roof, giant yawning windows, and lattice entwined with purple wisteria made her think of doll houses and thatch-roofed cottages. Excited to see Gram, Portia jumped out of the old truck and followed her mother in through the front door. The melting-brown-sugar and buttery-cinnamon smells reminded her that The Glass Kitchen was not for play. It was real, a place where people came from miles around to eat and talk with Portia's grandmother.

Ever since I’d started dating, I’d only spent time with the type of man who’d take me out to fancy restaurants where he paid the bill. Too bad none of them had ever made my heart pound like this giant man in a battered old pickup truck.

The town was relatively small. Beyond the sad side was a side maybe five years from going sad. Maybe more. Maybe ten. There was hope. There were some boarded-up enterprises, but not many. Most stores were still doing business, at a leisurely rural pace. Big pick-up trucks rolled through, slowly. There was a billiard hall. Not many street lights. It was getting dark. Something about the architecture made it clear it was dairy country. The shape of the stores looked like old-fashioned milking barns. The same DNA was in there somewhere.

I drove that yellow pickup truck for 120,000 miles—and do you know what? I never changed the oil. Not even once. This, of course, did irreparable damage to the engine. I drove down the street each day with white smoke billowing out of the exhaust pipe. I looked like Uncle Buck. Most of us will do almost anything, even foolish things, to avoid being told what it is we want. When someone tries to control us, it teaches us new ways to be dumb because it reminds us of old ways we’ve been manipulated before.

We all have hearts that wanna be old pick-up trucks permanently parked in someone's front yard.

He waved at a red pickup—one that looked old in a ready-for-the-junkyard way, rather than in a classic-car-show way—parked behind Jules’s SUV. A shepherd-type dog sat in the passenger seat, watching them with huge, pricked ears. “Why?” “No reason.” A rustling sound made her jerk her head around, but it was only the wind making leaves dance across the road. “Uh-huh,” Hugh said, not sounding as if he believed her. “Was someone bothering you in there?” “She wasn’t sure how to answer that. Although she would’ve sworn she heard someone outside her dressing room, she was starting to think that she was imagining things. After all, the past several days would’ve messed with almost anyone’s sanity. Since she didn’t want to consider that she couldn’t trust her own senses, she changed the subject. “What are you doing out here?” “Just…more errands.” For the first time since she’d met him, Hugh didn’t answer with his usual cocky confidence. Instead, his gaze darted to the side as he slid his hands in his pockets, looking like a strangely appealing combination of naughty boy and confident man. He snuck a glance at her, and she raised an eyebrow, making him huff and swing a hand toward the pickup. “My truck’s right there. I had to walk by here to get to it.” “Uh-huh.” She echoed his skeptical sound from earlier. “Do we need to have the stalking-is-bad talk again?” “I’m a cop, not a stalker,” he said with exaggerated patience. “I arrest stalkers.” “Might want to check out your house.” “What?” She smirked. “It’s looking a little see-through and glassy to me.” “What?” “Glass house? Throwing stones?” Lips pursed, he eyed her for several seconds. “You’re not very good at telling jokes.” “I’m an excellent joke teller!” Grace huffed. “Uh-huh.

So they found out all these exciting things about me, like: I drove an old pickup truck with cages in the back for my bird dogs, or I wore a Wal-Mart ball cap, or I got my hair cut at the barbershop just off the town square—somebody with a telephoto lens even snuck up and took a picture of me in the barber chair, and it was in newspapers all over the country.

...the dream shifts, this time to my grandmother lifting my mother’s mangled body into the bed of her old pickup. Her hands are drenched in blood, and it smears across her face when she wipes away the sweat on her brow. She hesitates before driving the truck home, staring at what remains of her daughter with utterly haunted eyes.

The boys walked into the gym, where hundreds of Navajo filled the stands, even three hours before their game. Players spotted mothers and grandparents, uncles and aunties and cousins, brothers and sisters and neighbors, folks who’d piled into old pickup trucks and vans and Chevy sedans to make that three-hour drive. There were Chinle stars who graduated last year and the year before that and the decade before that, young men who bathed still in past glory. There was Cecil Henry, a nearly sixty-year-old silversmith with a rakish mustache and an easy smile and a mighty thirst for the bottle, who crafted and sold beautiful jewelry to tourists on the floor of Canyon de Chelly. He once played high school basketball and ran like a deer and was related to a few of the Wildcats. He’d stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked here from Chinle.

Every few years, a teacher from Monroe Colored High loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pickup truck and rattled across the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks. They passed the rich people’s porticos and pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town. The boys jumped out and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away. That is how Monroe Colored High School got its books. The boys loaded the truck with old geography and English texts, some without covers and with pages torn out and love notes scrawled in the margins, and headed back to their side of town. By the time he was old enough to understand where the books came from, Pershing was fast putting together the pieces of the world he lived in. He knew there was a dividing line, but it was hitting him in the face now. He was showing a talent for science and was getting to the point that he needed reference books to do his lesson. But it was against the law for colored people to go to the public library. “And the library at the Colored High School did not live up to its name,” he said years later. He was in the eighth grade when word filtered to his side of the tracks that Monroe was getting a new high school. It wouldn’t replace the old building that Monroe Colored High was in. It was for the white students, who already had a big school. It would be called Neville High. The colored people could see it going up when they ventured to the other side of the tracks. It rose up like a castle, four stories of brick and concrete with separate wings and a central tower, looking as if it belonged at Princeton or Yale. It opened in 1931 on twenty-two acres of land. The city fathers made a fuss over the state-of-the-art laboratories for physics and chemistry, the 2,200-seat balconied auditorium, the expanded library, and the fact it was costing $664,000 to build. As the new high school took shape across town, Pershing watched his father rise in the black of morning to milk the cows and walk the mile and a half to open his building the size of a grade school. His father, his mother, and the other teachers at Monroe Colored High School were working long hours with hand-me-down supplies for a fraction of the pay their white counterparts were getting. In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year. Colored teachers and principals were making $499 a year, forty-three percent of what the white ones were.

Industrialization, for example. Even if the reservation could attract and sustain large-scale industry heavy or light, which it cannot, what have the Navajos to gain by becoming factory hands, lab technicians and office clerks? The Navajos are people, not personnel; nothing in their nature or tradition has prepared them to adapt to the regimentation of application forms and time clock. To force them into the machine would require a Procrustean mutilation of their basic humanity. Consciously or unconsciously the typical Navajo senses this unfortunate truth, resists the compulsory miseducation offered by the Bureau, hangs on to his malnourished horses and cannibalized automobiles, works when he feels like it and quits when he has enough money for a party or the down payment on a new pickup. He fulfills other obligations by getting his wife and kids installed securely on the public welfare rolls. Are we to condemn him for this? Caught in a no-man’s-land between two worlds the Navajo takes what advantage he can of the white man’s system—the radio, the pickup truck, the welfare—while clinging to the liberty and dignity of his old way of life. Such a man would rather lie drunk in the gutters of Gallup, New Mexico, a disgrace to his tribe and his race, than button on a clean white shirt and spend the best part of his life inside an air-conditioned office building with windows that cannot be opened.

and you’re a good match.’ ‘You have a very precise memory.’ ‘It was yesterday.’ ‘I should have told you he keeps a mistress and ignores me.’ Reacher smiled. He said, ‘Good night, Mrs Mackenzie.’ She left him there, the same as the night before, alone in the dark, on the concrete bench, looking at the stars. At that moment a mile away, Stackley clicked off a phone call and parked his beat-up old pick-up truck in a lot behind an out-of-business retail enterprise three blocks from the centre of town. Earlier in his life he had favoured expensive haircuts, and one time when waiting in the salon he had read a magazine that said success in business depended entirely on ruthless control of costs. Thus wherever possible he slept in his truck. Hence the camper shell. A motel would take what he made on two pills. Why give it away? The old gal across the Snowy Range had bought a box of fentanyl patches, but he had given her one he had already opened, an hour before, very carefully, so he could skim out a patch all his own, for his pocket, for later. The old gal would never notice. If she did, she would assume she was too stoned to count right. A natural reaction. Addicts learned to blame themselves. The same the world over. He took scissors from his glove box, and he cut a quarter-inch strip off the patch, and he slipped it under his tongue. Sublingual, it was called. Another magazine in the same salon said it was the best method of all. Stackley couldn’t argue. At that moment sixty miles away, in the low hills west of town, Rose Sanderson was putting herself to bed. She had pulled down her hood, and taken off her silver track suit top. Under it was a T-shirt, which she took off, and a bra, likewise. She peeled the foil off her face. She used her toothbrush handle to scrape excess ointment off her skin. She buttered it back on the foil. With luck she might get one more day out of it. She ran her sink full of cool water. She took a breath, and held her face under the surface. Her record was four minutes. She came up and shook her head. Her

Seven years ago tonight, every dream I ever had came true. That's not something too many men get to claim. I'm very lucky, blessed, whichever you believe. Probably a lot of both. Tonight marks the anniversary of my debut performance at Ceasars Palace." On his cue, the crowd whipped into congratulary rapture. Blindsided by his recollection, Isavel was motionless. That's what he recalls happening on this date? "Indulgent, lazy, self-centered... jerk!" she said, grabbing her purse, thinking she'd climb over the seat. "I'm going home!" Before she could turn, hositing herself over, a spotlight landed on her. In the darkened arena Aidan and Isabel were face-to-face. He stared. The same way he did years ago in his pickup truck, holding tight to her wrist, the same way he did on the dance floor at the gala. The same way he did in the moment she left him. "If you can believe it," he said, still staring, "something even more important happened that day. As dreams of fame and fortune go, this topped everything. I've always know that." Then, in a softer voice: "And I'm a fool because I should have never given up." Even from her vantage point, Isabel could see the gulp roll through his throat. "It's my great privilege this evening to introduce my wife, Isabel Royce." He gestered to the box. Isabel responded by sinking to her seat. "What's he talking about?" she hissed to Mary Louise. "We're divorced!" From her right, Tanya nudged her. It was like being on a palace balcony, Isabel offering a deer-in-the-headlights wave to the subjects, a thoroughly baffled look at Aidan. In return, he smiled at her clear confusion. "My wife ..." Why is he calling me that? There was a mixed reaction, lots of gasps, some applause, and the disappointed groans from female fans. "She's done me the tremendous honor of making a rare appearance at one of my shows. Seven years ago, she agreed to marry me. At the time, my life was more trouble than promise. We were two scared kids who had nothing but each other. Really, it was all I needed. We were married in true Vegas fashion." Hoots and hollers echoed, his glance dropping to the stage floor. Sharing this was making the performer uncomfortable. He pushed on. "While most women would have been satisfied with a ring ... " His long fingers fluttered over the snake. "This was Isabel's idea of a permanent bond." It drew a wave of subtle laughter, Isabel included. "Do you remember how the story went?" he said, speaking only to Isabel in a crowd of thousands. "As long as I had it, I'd never be without you. Turns out, it wasn't a story, it was the absolute truth. Lately though," he said, turning back to his public narrative, "circumstance, some serious, some calculated, has prevented me from getting my wife's attention. So tonight I resorted to an old performer's trick, a captive audience. I planned this moment, Isabel, knowing you'd be here. Regardless of anything you may believe, I meant what I said on our wedding night, in the moment I said it. I love you. I always have.